Tenuousness
by r3dd34th
Summary: Amy and the Doctor, creating wounds, patching them, you know the drill. No longer lemon-y since my views on the Amy/Dr relationship have changed. Sorry.
1. There's Something Wrong with the TARDIS

I don't own the Doctor Who characters or the TARDIS, unfortunately. **AN** - First time publishing anything, ever. Watch out. I apologize in advance.

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Amy Pond awoke to flashing lights, loud buzzers and something much more unnatural than a police box traveling through time and relative dimensions in space. The TARDIS was rumbling and something was telling Amy the alarms and whistles were not a friendly reminder to wake up and go for a run. Getting out of bed with the most quizzical of looks on her face, she stumbled against the TARDIS's violent rocking while making her way down the many twists and turns of the corridor to the main controls where she hoped the Doctor would be.

"Doctor!" Amy yelled over screaming alarms. The Doctor was wearing his trademark rosy shirt and trousers but he was more disheveled; he was missing his tweed jacket, his suspenders weren't really suspending his pants as they were hanging loosely off his hips and there was the addition of dark goggles to protect his eyes from the frequent sparks emitting from the central control panel. As the TARDIS jerked about, the Doctor braced himself against the controls, pulling every knob, levering ever lever, pushing every button and messing with every doohickey that was able to be messed with.

"Doctor!" Amy yelled again, louder this time, trying to be heard over the commotion.

He finally looked up, "Ah, Amy! You're awake! Good! I was going to wake you to ask…" he struggled against the bucking of the ship again, "-I was going to ask you to help me, but I thought I would let you stay in for a bit longer." Despite the obvious chaos on the ship, the Doctor was speaking very plainly and calm, but loud in order to be heard.

Amy looked incredulously at the bumbling Time Lord, firmly grasping a rail as so not to fall to the deck below. "What?" she shouted.

"I'm glad you're awake!" The Doctor started spelling again, "I said that I was going to ask you to help-"

"I understand that Doctor!" Amy interrupted, both frightened and exasperated, "but _what's wrong with the TARDIS?_"

"Ah, yes!" The Doctor said, continuing to constantly fiddle with the ships controls, growing more and more fervent, "that's why I was going to ask you to help!"

Amy made a loud disapproving noise and ran down to the control panel to help. With what, she had no idea.

"There seems to be something wrong with the TARDIS!" The Doctor yelled matter-of-factly when Amy approached.

Trying desperately not to be thrown off of her feet, Amy slammed one hand on the controls and the other on a nearby railing, and looking at the Doctor with a dumbfounded expression yelled, "Thank you Mr. Obvious!"

The Doctor's eyes were obscured by his comical, dark goggles, but he took a brief moment to raise his eyebrows in confusion at her. That's not his name. But back to the TARDIS.

"What _exactly_ is wrong?" yelled Amy, trying to get a direct answer so she could help.

"I don't know yet! But one of these levers is bound to start talking soon enough!" he yelled, giving the closest lever a violent smack to the left, producing to noticeable results, adding, "Did you know that this was meant to be flown by six pilots?"

_I doubt that _two-dozen_ would help now_, Amy thought. "What can I do!" Amy stared anxiously at the control board, wondering whether the Doctor really knows how to fly the ship, and if his senseless beatings upon the controls had actually endangered them further.

"Erm!" The Doctor struggled to take his attention away from the buttons and pulleys again, "take this!" He handed over his sonic screwdriver without looking where he was handing it, "Wave it around the ship a bit! Try and find what's wrong!" The Doctor kept his wide eyes, most likely darting around the board, focused on what he was doing rather than the instructions he was giving Amy. "It should fix it if you find it!"

"Find what?" yelled Amy, daftly holding the alien device.

"What's wrong!" the Doctor shouted back, with a tone implicating that that was obvious.

"Why can't you do this? I don't know what I'm looking for!" Amy cried out.

"Because I'm flying!" yelled the Doctor, pausing to add, ""duh!"

Amy threw up her hands in defeat, one of them holding the screwdriver, moved one foot in the air to leave, when the ship was again bucked violently, sending Amy careening forward.

The Doctor, though mostly a clumsy, confused humanoid, happened to tear his attention away from the flashing controls to catch Amy with an unusual grace, stepping sideway to brace her fall, catching her in his left arm, while holding onto what looked like the launcher for a pinball machine with his right. He looked through his goggles to her and despite the intense rumblings, sparks flying and threat of spontaneous combustion at any second, he still looked carefully at her to let her know she was alright and like he has told her, time and time again, she needs to trust him.  
With another tug on the walls of the TARDIS, Amy was flung back upright and the Doctor, un-phased, resumed his duties.

"Flying? You call this flying?" Amy yelled angrily, though deeply thankful the Doctor did not let her spill herself onto the floor behind him.

"And don't break it!" The Doctor was once again looking intently at the controls, flipping toggles madly, dashing from side to side of the cylindrical panel.

Amy looked at the sonic made of metal and who-knows-what alien alloys and looked back at the Doctor in disbelief that she would have any knowing part in it's destruction. She sighed heavily and turned around, walking as quickly as she could without letting go of any stable surface for too long.

She got to the top of the stairs and the hallway immediately split in either direction. The layout of the ship was more confusing than the concept of a time-traveling police box, but she soldiered on, first journeying to places that she was familiar with, all the while holding the screwdriver out in front of her, active at all times, waiting for something significant to happen. What that was, Amy was yet to find out. Amy ran through her room, the kitchen, the dining room, the water closet (literally), the second dining room, the rarely seen Doctor's room, possibly another dining room, but maybe just the first again, before she began running feverishly into rooms she had never seen before. One was a cricket pitch, complete with plush lawn and equipment, another a large movie theater.

Amy found room after unusual room that had gone untouched and maybe even unseen for a long time, yet there were no results as she brandished the screwdriver in ever direction around her, constant lights and alarms dulling her senses in every way. She took a large breath, as hers was growing short and turned around completely, finding herself in front of a very familiar door. Not familiar as in one she had previously seen on the ship, but just one she had seen previously. She placed her hands against the painted, wooden door as she felt dozens of memories fill her head. Though the ship had been rumbling and rolling the entire time she was searching, Amy felt a massive lurch from the belly of the ship, sending her whole body crashing against the door, smashing the screwdriver against the frame, making the familiar whirring noise. In this most recent jolt, Amy was also send plowing through the door into a room she knew very well.

Amy, after a short moment of stunned confusion, sat up on the floor of her Leadworth bedroom. The intense motion of the TARDIS has ceased and the blaring alarms and abrasive lights were no more. Amy set the sonic on the floor next to her, and slowly turned her head to study the blue room around her, her attention fixated on her immediate surrounds rather than the welcome stillness of the ship. As Amy look from the floor at everything she could see in the room, she was reminded of parts of her life she had left behind in a small town on a small planet. Everything was in exact detail as she remembered it: her sheets were the same, all of her books were in place, lights were even on, all of her little Doctor dolls were laying about in the places she had put them last. The moon was even shining outside the window, as if she were still waiting for a visitor to fall from the heavens behind the silvery orb. A cool breeze rolled through, and Amy closed her eyes and took a deep breath, no longer able to suppress the flood of memories contained in this room. She pried herself from the floor and continued to gaze at her wondrous room, and flopped down on her bed.  
She was overcome with a sense of calm in these familiar surroundings, but they didn't last long. As her lazily closing eyes focusing on the doorway from which she came, she saw the interior of a TARDIS hallway, instead of the stairway in her Leadworth house. She scrambled to the foot of the bed and peered over, and saw the sonic screwdriver sitting there. Amy was trying to grapple with the thought of being transported somehow back to Leadworth, when she just now realized that she was still in fact on the space ship. Her head reeled a bit and she slouched as she sat on her quilted bed, trying to work out what her bedroom, her real bedroom, was doing inside the TARDIS.


	2. The New Addition

**AN** - Thanks for showing interest! Still don't know what I'm doing. :-/

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Staring with knitted brows at her paper models of the Police Box she clearly remembered making _on Earth_ when she was a child, Amy Pond still couldn't comprehend what she had found. In every detail, this was her room as she had left it that night when the Doctor came back, the night before her wedding. Her thoughts ran in circles without conclusion, and she could only find two justifications for this anomaly. Perhaps she was delusional, and the recent, violent tossing of the TARDIS had flung her headfirst into something most unwelcoming to the human skull. Either this, or someone put it here. She flushed at the first thought that came to her head: maybe the Doctor built it for her. Maybe it was a present.

Amy immediately shut these thoughts away. _The Doctor wouldn't build a room for me_, Amy thought,_ and how would he have gotten all of my things? Plus, he's been busy and in my sight nearly all day and every day._ Through rationalization, Amy had made herself quite sad at the prospect of the busy Doctor not giving a second's thought about her.

Just as she finished the thought, she heard another pair of footsteps banging down the metal-grated floor of the ship, coming nearer. Amy was pulled from her thoughts and looked up into the clashing visuals of her blue bedroom walls colliding with an interior, metal hallway of the TARDIS. Then the Doctor appeared between them, poking his shoulders and head around the doorframe.

"Amy!," the Doctor said cheerfully, the dark goggles now resting on his forehead, pushing his hair back into an even more peculiar shape.

Amy stared for a second at him, taking a while to respond.

The Doctor walked into the room, held his arms apart with his palms up, and displayed a closed-mouth, crooked grin. "You fixed my TARDIS, Amy!" he said with a childlike excitement.

It took Amy another beat to remember that not moments ago, there had been a near constant thrashing about of the ship and some of the loudest (not to mention annoyingly abundant) alarms blaring everywhere. She didn't say anything but smiled slightly at him and his praise, but due to her confusion at the most recent situation, went back to her stony-faced confusion.

The Doctor's smile slowly ebbed as well and he put his hands down, letting his eyes dart around for a moment. He turned his head as far as it would go to the left, his torso following with a more delayed reaction from his legs and feet, eventually making several full, frenzied turns. "Amy," the Doctor said astonished, "we're in your room."

She was a little relieved to know that the Doctor was as dumbfounded as she was, but Amy couldn't help but be a little disappointed that the Doctor had nothing to do with it. "You didn't know it was here?" she inquired after some silence.

The Doctor had been poking around, smelling things, even licking one or two, but turned to Amy and said, "of course not. I mean, I knew this was here, but not _this_," he gestured to the room.  
"You knew the room was here, but you didn't know the room was here…" Amy pondered aloud slowly.

"Precisely," the Doctor pointed at Amy, "this room, this physical space in the ship, has always been here, but it has not always been _your _room." He kept muttering, something about things being "interesting" and "incredible" and other "I" words.

Amy watched the Doctor wander through her things, alternating pulling his hair back and rubbing his hands together in thought. After nearly a minute of silence, save the Doctor's mutterings, Amy asked him, "So there used to be something else here? Why my bedroom now? Where did all of this stuff come from?"

The Doctor turned to Amy Pond, looking down at her with large eyes, thoughts racing behind them. The Doctor studied Amy intensely, while she just gazed back, anxiously awaiting a response. The intensity in his eyes dissolved into a much softer look. He tilted his head to the side, grinned wide, crinkling his eyes and said, "The TARDIS must have taken a fancy to you." He opened his mouth and let out a single laugh, obviously very happy at this prospect. He then turned to investigate the room again.

Amy's eyebrows were beginning to hurt from remaining so furrowed for so long, but her questions were still unanswered, "Doctor, it still doesn't make sense," she said as her eyes following him around what was maybe or maybe not her bedroom.

"Ah. Pond," he said, curtailing his poking around to sit on the bed next to her, "the TARDIS is smart, and I'm not sure that _I_ even know all the ins and outs of her."

_It doesn't help that you threw the manual into a supernova_, Amy thought. Hundreds of examples ran through Amy's mind at the Doctor's ineptitude at flying the ship, today's show being one of them. She rolled her eyes, and the Doctor noticed, but continued, leaning against Amy with his shoulder.

"What I've noticed is that the TARDIS can sometimes develop a relationship with its passenger, and can generate…things accordingly. For instance, there hasn't always been a swimming pool, which I have yet to find—" he trailed off.

"So the TARDIS _made_ this room for me?" Amy interrupted the Doctor's vocal meanderings about the whereabouts of his pool.

Pushing his chip up, the Doctor gave a tiny smile and said, "It seems so. What's really incredible about all this," the Doctor stood up from the bed, turning around a few times again, looking the room up and down, "is that, from what I've seen, it normally takes a long relationship with the TARDIS—years, decades before it starts really welcoming someone like this. You've been here barely more than a day and it's recreating some of the most sentimental parts of your life in full detail." He quickly knelt down in front of Amy and moved his face close to hers, looking back and forth between her eyes searching for something.

"Who are you Amelia Pond?"

Amy knew who she was, down to every hair on her head. She thought that the focus should be on the TARDIS and why _it_ was doing this, but instead the Doctor was positively fixated on_ her_ now. The ship was the (unreliable) constant and Amy had become an outlying variable.

"I guess the TARDIS just really likes me," Amy finally said, holding her chin up a bit.

The Doctor let out another quick laugh, stood up smiling and paused for a moment. "How did you fix the ship?" he asked, his smile falling from his face, replaced instead with a look of absolute curiousity.

Amy's face turned into a slight grimace, "How should I know? You told me to wave the screwdriver around until the—"

"My screwdriver!" the Doctor shouted with concern, his hand racing to his chest where there is normally a breast-pocket containing a sonic, but now was just his button-up shirt. In quick, jerky movement, he tapped his hands against all of his pockets several times over, even checking some parts of his clothing that would be rather questionable for the storage of a sonic screwdriver.

Amy sighed a little, bent over the footboard, and reached onto the floor, retrieving the sonic. Sitting back up, she handed it to the Doctor who snatched it quickly, kissed it and tried to put it in a non-existent pocket in his absent jacket. It fell on the floor with a clatter. He quickly picked it up, kissed it once more and daftly made the same motion, almost dropping it, before grabbing it with the other hand and opting to put it in his back trousers pocket instead. Amy watched the whole thing and couldn't help but chuckle at this near-Vaudevillian show.

"When did the—everything stop?" The Doctor asked Amy, with "everything" implying the lights, alarms and general chaos.

"I suppose right before I fell into this room," Amy said plainly.

"So, you fixed it outside of this room?"

"I suppose so."

The Doctor backed through the door, facing the frame and the interior where Amy was, and buzzed his sonic all around the door and nearby walls. He pulled the screwdriver back close to his eyes and looked at the interior tubing that gave him readings (in a language that Amy seemed to never be able to comprehend) and retracted the sonic back to his pocket. He reached into the room, grabbed the handle, and swung the door back and forth a couple of feet, then in tiny, quick motions, all the while, looking near the top of the door.

"What is it Doctor?" Amy broke another silence.

He stopped his door swinging, put his hands in his front pockets and said, "It seems that the bolt on the hinge was a bit loose."

Amy stared at the Doctor. He shrugged and turned to head back down the corridor. She sat there once again very confused (a frequent pattern with the Doctor) when her eyes grew wide with understanding. She stood up with so much tenacity that she stamped her foot a little, and clenching her fists at her sides, stormed out after the Doctor.

"Doctor," Amy yelled to the distant man. "You mean to tell me," she continued pacing towards him while he stood still, hands in pockets, half-turned towards her, "that the TARDIS was throwing us around for the last thirty minutes, blaring alarms and blinding me with warning lights… because a _bolt_ was _loose_?"

The Doctor repeated the statement in his head as Amy stood within inches of him, pressed his lips together and gave a small nod accompanying the word, "Yes." He started to turn away from Amy, keeping a cocky sort of eye contact with her, smiled smugly and kept walking to the main control room.


	3. Care More

**AN **- It's been a really long time. Oops. This was a section that I felt I could share on its own as including anymore would leave weird gaps. Also, since writing this, some of the things have weirdly come true, so I'm still deciding whether those should be left in or not.

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"Doctor!" Amy shouted at his back. The confusion caused by her room appearance was spilling-over onto a new emotion: anger. Why was she yelling? Her fists balled, she spewed the first thought that came into her head: "How can you just be so calm about everything! Why don't you care more?"

The Doctor paused in his tracks, but did not turn back to face Amy. She immediately wanted to eat those words, but the bubble of anger in her throat wouldn't allow it.

"Care more?" the Doctor calmly said to the air in front of him. "Oh Amelia..." he sadly crooned to himself. His shoulders slumped and he turned slowly, hands still in pockets. With his lips pursed, eyes looking downward, he took a few steps toward Amy.

"Doctor, I didn't mean-" Amy blurted, anger turning inward.

"-Amelia Pond," the Doctor interrupted, "I've cared for longer than you can imagine, and so much more than you can imagine."

Amy stared at him, eyes wide and mouth hanging agape.

The Doctor opened his mouth a time or two, trying to think of words, "if you only knew, the countless races and planets, the suffering and blood I carry with me everyday..." his voice broke with anger, or sadness, "you might better understand my capacity for caring and why a... loose bolt, an inexplicable room... a crashing ship might not make it onto my list," he spat the last word.

Amy was now looking at the floor, tears welling, avoiding the Doctor's almost certainly calm and furious gaze. After a few moments, she saw through blurry eyes, his boots disappear from her view and stir up echoing footsteps as he headed away from her.

She felt like a child that had just been scolded by their favorite superhero. Why can I never think before I speak- or, rather, yell. Amy's face was flushed from previous anger and current regret, and for the first time since joining the Doctor on the TARDIS, she hated that it was just the two of them on the ship. What she wouldn't give to be a mile away from him, or back in her real room in Leadworth, just to escape this foolish pain she caused herself.

Amy let the floating tears fall from her eyes and slowly headed in the opposite direction that the Doctor had gone, hoping to find a diversion, however temporary. She let her feet do all the thinking, concentrating more on her shoulders that ached from quietly crying and her stinging eyes. She wandered for what felt like hours, letting her eyes finally dry, until she felt almost nothing, a common symptom that followed a big cry. As her vision grew less blurry, she found her eyes searching the corridors of the TARDIS for the first time in a good hour. Where was she?

There was still a dull ache in her chest from the earlier incident, but some of her old spark had found its way back into her core. She looked around with a newfound curiousity, hoping to distract herself a bit more, at least for a while.

She continued through the halls for a minute, finding nothing but doorless walls and passageways up ahead. After some time though, Amy came upon doors that looked ancient and presently untouched, carved upon which were large circular patterns, inlaid with gold and odd-looking metals. Her wonderment overtook her, and before she could think twice, her hand was on the doorknob. As the huge door creaked open, Amy felt a perceptible change in atmosphere. The cool lights of the TARDIS behind her paled as a soft, amber glow fell out of the door in a single shaft of light. Her eyes focused first on the dust particles sifting slowly through the previously undisturbed air. As she looked past them, she was positively bowled over at what lay behind the doors.


End file.
